I'd like to propose a Spiral Dynamics game.  I originally posted this game as "Spiral Confessions" on the old IN forum, but I'd like to give it another chance to develop here. (I was reminded of this thread because I just received an email from a friend, not an I-I member, who read it and sent me her reflections on Blue.)

I'd like to invite anyone interested to give accounts of those periods of your life that you can recall when you inhabited a particular memetic center of gravity, and also stories or descriptions of the ways that those values still show up in your life today.

Here's the way I'd like to do it.  Divide the accounts into "days" and "ways" --

Red Days:  Stories of acting from a Red center in your youth, or whenever you first originally inhabited this meme; descriptions of your patterns or thoughts or behaviors; words or images or music you preferred; etc.

Red Ways: Descriptions of how Red shows up in your life now, whether in a healthily integrated way, or perhaps as a denied or feared undercurrent; ways it subtly colors aspects of your life, or perhaps lends support to you.

You can do this for each of the colors, in both tiers...as high or as low as you want to go (as long as you've already gone there)!

There might be a third category too --

Red Forays:  Stories of how you may have consciously chosen to enter an alien or uncomfortable memetic space, in order to stretch your boundaries or learn something new or begin to process what you have neglected.  This section could contain accounts of deliberate activities you've engaged in for memetic growth purposes (my main suggestion), but it could also be used to describe hints you have of something shifting, of current values cracking open and something new emerging.

I'm posting this in Interplay because I recognize that some of this material can be very sensitive, and I don't want any of you to be intimidated or to feel that you have to share difficult and painful things here (though I expect you will find supportive and loving listeners, if you do).  For now, though, I suggest we approach this lightly in the beginning, and just see how it develops.

Best wishes,

Balder

* P.S.  This thread isn't only for those who have mastered the Spiral Dynamics lingo.  I do not consider myself an expert in SD, by any means.  I'm still learning it.  This is just something I came up with to help me understand it better, by attempting to apply it to my life.  I think it makes for a fun way to get familiar with this stuff, and might work well in a classroom too.  We'll see...

Here's my first attempt at doing this kind of SD self-analysis.  Technically, I was probably already into Blue during the period I describe below (beyond the "raw red" of the terrible twos which I cannot clearly recall), but there was still enough red present, I think, for me to be able to identify the following things......

Red Days:  I recall long summer evenings, riding bicycles as fast as we could around the cul-de-sac with all of the boys on my block, leaping off of homemade ramps, measuring our skidmarks.  If you made one more than several feet long, or if you had colored tires that could leave long blue or red streaks, you had special status in our circle.  Sometimes we would gather at the end of the block, at the edge of the overgrown bayou, and divide into teams for wargames.  Our favorite weapon was speargrass, which we would gather in bunches and then hurl at each other.  All of us battled on with countless "spears" sticking out of our backs and chests, hunting each other down and then retreating to gather more of the sharp stalks, until someone finally collapsed on the ground in exhaustion, or more often than not, got called home for dinner.  If boys from other blocks ventured into our territory, even daring to stand on the far side of the bayou, we would challenge them and hurl insults their way.  One afternoon, I was playing in the bayou alone.  I had climbed up the far face of the gulley and was enjoying the view when a boy from another neighborhood showed up.  Unconsciously, unbidden, hostility arose in me, even though I was usually not an aggressor.  I called him a name and told him to get away from our block.  He insulted me back, and we ended up scuffling there on the edge of the cliff.  In the midst of the struggle, I saw my opportunity, and I shoved him over the edge.  He rolled down the cliff face and landed in the dirty creek water below, bursting into tears.  The sound of him crying cut through the spell of aggression and territoriality, and for some reason I had an impulse to even the score: I invited him up to the top of the cliff and told him he could toss me off as well.  He did so, and I also rolled down the bayou and into the water below.  I stood up and looked at him and we both knew it was over.  We turned around and went back to our homes.

Red Ways:  I have not integrated Red very well into the overall pallet of values that I draw on.  In my life, Red was not often reflected in a healthy form.  After the tribal days of bicycle gangs and forest forts, my primary encounters with Red involved bullies or alcoholic, aggressive relatives.  As I moved out of Red interiorly, I was not able to escape the intimidating power of Red in common situations at home or in school, and I think this has skewed my relationship with it somewhat.  In my Diamond Approach work, I have been focusing fairly frequently on contacting Red Essence, having discovered that the wall I put up against its potent juices has done more than protect me from its dangerous expression; it has managed to cut me off from its vitality as well.  So I am working to venture into this territory more consciously, and to form a new relationship with it.  For a number of years in my late teens and early twenties, the buried volcanic force of Red would erupt in sudden anger at the slightest tremors in my environment.  I eventually managed to form a healthier relationship to this volatility, through meditation and self-inquiry, and I learned to express myself verbally rather than bottling emotion in, but I still find I can explode unconsciously on occasion with sharp words, especially when I am feeling stressed or insecure.

Red Forays:  A later healthy journey into Red occurred at the end of high school and during the beginning years of college, when I played in a rock band.  The three of us were very close, and we considered ourselves a tribe, facing down a sick world and warring against corrupt Authorities with our "axes" and our words of power.  We could create whole worlds with our forceful chords and rhythms and images, and we enjoyed inhabiting this sonic space with each other and with those few friends who understood what we were about, launching volleys at the Great Chief in Washington and the Mean Orange and Blue Memes...

Best wishes,

Balder

Here is the letter I received from my friend, Kerry, describing her experience of Blue....

~*~

Perhaps this thread will go about as far as it did on the old forum, which is not very far at all, but I'm still going to shamelessly "push" it for a while longer and hope others are inspired to write! 

Here is a link to the original thread on IN:

http://in.integralinstitute.org/public/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=16001

And here is the reflection I offered on Purple...

Purple Days:  I only have a few clear memories from the time period that I imagine my center of gravity was Purple, or Purple transitioning to Red.  Dreams and real events from this period do not have a sharp boundary between them.  I recall answering a knock on a door in a basement and being confronted by a large monster covered in blue hair.  I wrote a story about this event a year or two later, which I believe my parents still have, and in it I make no mention of dreaming; I simply report that I was visited by a monster.  In the same half-basement, I also have vivid memory of looking out a window and seeing the wind, moving in the air like black swirls -- like the sworls on the tips of our fingers.  While most certainly a dream as well, this memory is tied closely to recollections of my parents' loud parties (1969 or 1970), when I would play with friends and siblings down in the basement, emerging occasionally to navigate a sea of legs stretching up into a cloud of incoherent white noise as the adults laughed and chattered.  In my mind, seeing the black wind, playing in the basement, and wandering a little nervously among loud, mysterious adults upstairs all hang together like a single event.  Another memory is also clear from this period: Walking in Oregon down a long country road along which peas grew in profusion, and finding a bright red ball there in the grass.  Overjoyed, I picked it up and tossed it in my hands, which caused it to explode and spray me with red juice.  I was terrified by the event and ran home, trying to make sense of it.  My parents explained that I had picked up a tomato, not a ball.  I felt personally offended and betrayed by the ball.  That "rupture" in my expectations (and the personal affront that involved) was apparently deep enough to have left imprints that are still clear to me to this day.

Purple Ways:  On first reflection, I do not see many vestiges of purple in my life right now.  It sometimes shows up, I believe, in a feeling of affection and attachment I have to an old car that is sitting damaged in my garage right now.  I purchased it when I was first married, and it carried us across the country more than once.  I am sad now that it is on its last leg, and every now and then an impulse arises as I pass it to speak to it, to relate to it in the second person and thank it for the work it did for us.  I also have a ritual that I do when I mail something important: I set an intent, I say some words of blessing, and then I let it go.

Purple Forays:  I venture into Purple space most often with my son, when I listen to his thoughts and dreams.  Last night he told me I could know anything if I learned how to concentrate, to strengthen my chest and make my heart beat faster, to make blood go into my brain, and (pulsing his hands like a flower above his head) let the ideas come out.  He loves to hear what the objects in his world have to say, so I often animate them for him, letting him know what the grass says, what the trees whisper, how the rug feels when he jumps and slides on it (ooomph!  aaaah!), and how his "cavity goons" scream in fear every time his toothbrush is near.  I believe I also experienced Purple moments while living and camping in Arizona years ago.  The land spoke on occasion, communicating in animal presences, signs, and ominous subliminal rumbles.  These experiences had a different character than the blissful "nature mysticism" events of oneness and intimacy that also graced me, and usually were associated more with a sense of awe and fear.

balder:

Perhaps this thread will go about as far as it did on the old forum, which is not very far at all, but I'm still going to shamelessly "push" it for a while longer and hope others are inspired to write! 

Have no fear, I will be back for more public self exploration - with green orange and yellow at least.

Just need a little time.

Oh, but it would also be nice to have a few more real friends in Hell . . . . Whimps!

B! You're Brilliant. You're definitely a king in this club. It's funny I was just thinking of you when I wrote that thing about the inverted tree and the return of Red. 

Blessings,

L

I’ve been intending to write on Blue for some time now, but it’s been difficult for me to get a handle on it.  On another thread, Jane wondered aloud if she’d ever been Blue, because Green had been such a dominant force in her life.  I relate to that in some ways; but like her, I recognize that I did inhabit Blue at different times in my life.  The following is my first, somewhat tentative reflection on those times.

Blue Days:  Having been raised by a father who was Orange (or Blue/Orange) and a mother who was Green (with streaks of Purple), I never received strong indoctrination into Blue values.  Of course, as the oldest child and the only son, I had to learn to move out of Red fairly early on – to follow the rules of my house, to help impart them to my sisters, to respect the authority of my teachers, and so on – so it seems fair to describe the earliest childhood period that I can recall as “Blue.”  But the atmosphere in my Texas home was quite unlike the authoritarian, Christian, God-and-country environments in many of my friends’ homes – something I vaguely recognized even then. 

My parents encouraged questioning, wonder, awe, avoiding pat answers to my childish musings even while welcoming them.  They invited me to see from other perspectives, to get to know the foreign student in my class, to look out into the night sky and imagine the cosmos and the life it might contain.  I attended Sunday School at the Episcopal Church, joined the Boy Scouts and the Indian Guides, played on the soccer team, studied mythology, and so on – each of which experience invited me to enter a Blue space of values and ideas – but the atmosphere of my home always served somewhat as a counterbalance to these things: I was able to “play” with them, but my parents kept things more open at home, allowing critical perspectives and encouraging the cultivation of creative imagination.  I don’t think this was intentional on their part; it’s just who they were, and the post-Blue horizons they set allowed me to move through Blue without “sticking” there.

I did return more consciously to Blue in my late teen years.  High school was very difficult for me in many ways, and when a number of painful events conspired to push me over the edge from despair and rage into even more drastic conditions, I consciously embraced Christianity – not as the faith of my family, but as a personal path of transformation.  In my anger and depression, Red had arisen again and was very near the surface; I could explode into anger easily, or brood for days in self-absorbed and despairing darkness.  I would fight with my sisters or mother, punch holes in walls, or get into fights in high school (not something that was natural to me, but my usually calm nature was deeply rattled, and I just no longer wanted to take taunts passively).  In this very disturbed emotional condition, I was desperate for healing and order – for meaning, higher purpose, hope, a future – and Christianity offered me these things, and more.  I embraced the self-discipline it required, not as a burden, but as a balm – as a way to heal the raging Red child in me, to find my way out of the darkness, to begin to smile again and to contribute positively to the world again.  It was a great relief to recognize a higher power, a greater authority on which I could rely for value and direction and support, for the love that I could not yet give to myself. 

This all-powerful Blue Force of goodness was not something that I had known in my Orange-Green home, and it offered resources to me that had been missing.  But because I had been raised in such a home, I also was not able to simply take on board the whole “package” of Christianity, with all its mythic doctrines and beliefs.  I eventually began to question and inquire again, moving from the moral grounding and just the pure joy that my initial conversion experience had provided, to look for something in the church that could nourish my soul more than the mythic and moralistic homilies I heard every week.  I began to seek out the Christian mystics, the saints who pushed the bounds of convention and dared to dive deeper into the mystery…and this led to new phases in my life, beyond the Blue days of my metanoia…

I haven’t written about Blue Ways and Blue Forays yet; that will have to wait till another post.

Best wishes,

Balder

Blue Ways:  At some point in my early twenties, I started to resent Blue, and this time I formed resistances against it instead of just sliding past it (as I had in my youth).  At least, that is how I read the situation now.  I had joined a Christian university right out of high school, and I found myself an "outsider" among most of the Christians I knew -- many of whom would attempt to "lure" me to their houses or to restaurants, not for fun, it turns out, but to convert me to their specific form of Christianity and get me to renounce the mystical, Catholic "heresies" that attracted me.  I resented this, and some of the enforced conformity of the environment overall (where we got negative marks if we failed to log in to chapel every day.)

I mention this because I am uncertain now how Blue shows up in my life.  I think I've had shadow around it, which I've been working to deal with and resolve (as I'll explain in Blue Forays), so if there are any Blue traces in me, I may be projecting them outside.   I do retain a kind of idealism, and I often associate idealism with Blue -- but it can also show up in other memes as well.  In general, I now respect the place of Blue in development, and I'm having to exercise it some in the raising of my son -- introducing him to rules, Blue-level behavior, making distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, etc.

There may be other ways it shows up that I'm not seeing right now.  If any people here who know me well (through my posts) can see "Blue ways" in me that I cannot see, maybe you can help me by pointing them out.

Blue Forays:  For a number of years, I have consciously been venturing back into Blue spaces, through listening to conservative (political and religious) radio broadcasts and participating on largely Blue Christian forums.  I first started doing this out of morbid fascination -- coming across a radio station in rural Virginia broadcasting views that shocked and amused me, and driving around transfixed by the alien message.  It seemed like a broadcast from another world.  I soon recognized "shadow" in my morbid fascination, however, and began to make a more serious effort to understand and even make room for this perspective.  This has been a long, slow process.  I've spent many hours arguing and debating with and criticizing Blues for one thing or another.  But eventually this shifted, as I began to go deeper into issues and get to know the individuals I was talking with better.  A mutual respect developed with a number of people, and I have found nourishment in these sorts of perspective expanding, boundary dissolving (or boundary accommodating) exchanges.  Through these exchanges, I also have come to more fully appreciate the subtlety of human development: the fact that an individual chooses to align him or herself with a largely Blue value system does not mean they are limited to levels of moral reasoning or cognitive development that we typically associate with "mythic membership" thinking.  Exchanges with Blue are often more frustrating than rewarding, but these "forays into Blue" have helped me to both be open and more discriminating with regard to receiving what members of this meme want to communicate.

Are y'all gonna leave me standing here in my rainbow colored boxers?  I guess I'm okay with that -- nothing to be embarrassed about around you folks -- but I think it would be fun if others joined me out here on the SD catwalk.

Seriously, this thread didn't generate a lot of responses on the old forum, so I didn't expect a lot to happen here either.  I do have a request, though.  If anyone has been reading this, but hasn't been moved to respond, would you mind letting me know your general thoughts about an exercise like this?  For the moment, it's just an experiment for me, and I've enjoyed embarking on an SD-inspired self-analysis.  It provides a different lens than other classification systems I've worked with, so it highlights new territory.  But while this is just for fun now, I've thought about bringing an exercise like this into a class one day, if I ever land a dream teaching job somewhere, and would like to know if you think something like this would be worthwhile.

Best wishes,

Balder

balder:

Are y'all gonna leave me standing here in my rainbow colored boxers?

Seriously, this thread didn't generate a lot of responses on the old forum either, so I didn't expect a lot to happen here either.  I do have a request, though.  If anyone has been reading this, but hasn't been moved to respond, would you mind letting me know your general thoughts about an exercise like this? 

Buddy, it's Marvelous. I love it. Right now i'm not in a place to dive into this game, but your passionate devotion and celebration of Spirit's journey from Light to Light hasn't gone unnoticed or unappreciated.

Louis

yschachter:

Hey, what was that? The inverted tree thing? I really, really wanted to understand it, and couldn't quite.

Howdy. weird stuff has been happening in ernest over the last year, since my theophany in October. most recently i found myself engulfed in the Red and Purple worlds where the boundary between dreams and reality are poorly defined. the pre-trans beast had its day and i was walking in the woods holding a crucifix tightly being pursued by Satan. it felt just like i was Frodo running from the ring wraiths. even as a ten year old i don't think i was ever so ridiculous. how did it happen?

"you were inverted. no-one alerted you." ~ George Harrison.

many, many, MANY...fall prey to the Great Inversion. why do those who finally enter the Secret World go crazy and imagine they're running from dragons like in the movie The Fisher King?  because the self-knots that are deep inside us and hardest to untie require the sword of Manjushri. the scared little child in the basement of our soul, terrified of Satan, IS the Anti-Christ. to the degree it resists death it will blossom into a dark flower to devour even the best of us.  

we become a child, but it seems to me the Great Inversion is a phase of the Dark Night of the Soul that is healthy and neccessary. this reminds me of the very end of the movie Sybil with Sally Field. it was on recently and i caught the end where all her selves are being called out. everyone, everyone, EVERY ONE...will be included. the child crying in the basement and hiding from Satan really has to be sacrificed and there can be no substitute. the Father/Mother has to have the Love to say "you're goin' down boy!" one way or another the Damien Thorn in the side of Love has to join The Rose.

"Love is a wound, and it never will heal." ~ Adi Da.

balder:

If anyone has been reading this, but hasn't been moved to respond, would you mind letting me know your general thoughts about an exercise like this? 

I think it's a worthwhile exercise, Bruce, and especially good for a group of people who feel safe enough in each other's presence to expose various vulnerabilities and wounds and turning points.

I've been considering sharing some spiral ways and forays here, but I find that I'm either just plain stumped on certain colors or afraid to publicly share some meatier, deeper stuff involving profound (and occasionally disturbing) personal experiences. This may be just my own skewed perception or some kind of projection, but this space feels so much more public than the previous, "dimly-lit" IN forum. Anybody could be reading this, I say to myself, and while I can imagine sharing these things in a group including people like you, Louis, Arthur, Tiki and Tamgoddess, Michael D, Rhonda, and others I've either met in person or whom I've come to know, in a fashion, in earlier "darker"  forum days--at the moment I feel more reluctant doing so in this bright new space. A part of me fears being judged and/or misinterpreted, and unfortunately my addiction to acceptance and approval remains a monkey on my back.

Maybe I'm still just warming up to it.

But carry on in your rainbow boxers!

Mary

A part of me fears being judged

Dammit! I think just saw one of my shadows, y'all! This concern about being judged by others is actually my very own disowned judgmentalism!

Ouch,

Mary

P.S. Now as soon as I can fully embrace my own, um, ability to discern, I'll join the Spiral Dynamics game ... (spin control)